Seattle restaurants and swine flu: Should you worry?

The question came up on a San Francisco Chronicle food blog last week and reflects a common concern about swine flu:

A waitress wears a surgical mask as she works at a restaurant in Mexico City in May 2009. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images)

What if you go to a restaurant and your waiter or waitress is sick with the flu but didn’t want to take a sick day miss a day of work?

State codes require restaurants to comply with various safety rules, and each year an estimated 50,000 King County food service workers — including cooks, waiters and other staff — take food safety courses to become certified to work.

“My phone rings a lot on a lot of things,” Anthony Anton said. “This hasn’t been one of the things that has come in.”

Anton called the restaurant industry “one of the safest” in all things H1N1. And Karasz said her office gets more concerned calls from service workers like bus drivers whose job puts them in contact with many potential carriers than from consumers concerned about contact with service workers.

Stay home or make money

But what about this sick day thing?

Washington’s own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray is among several supporters of the Healthy Families Act, which would provide seven paid sick days to all workers at companies with at least 15 employees, and prevent employers from retaliating against workers who get sick.

Fifty-seven million U.S. private sector workers and three out of four low-wage workers do not have paid sick leave, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Families are having to decide between a tough economy where they don’t have income and following the regulations of staying home the CDC has issued,” Murray said in a congressional hearing on the matter last week. “We should make sure that they stay home when they’re sick.”

Restaurants rarely guarantee sick days for their employees, which makes it conceivable that — as the San Francisco Chronicle blog described — some could avoid common sense and show up to work.

Anton rejects that. Most restaurant workers operate on flexible schedules, he said. If an employee is sick, it’s easy to get someone else to cover a shift and pick up the hours later.